SO, YOU WANT TO KNOW SOMETHING ABOUT ME? Well, my name is DAVID WARK GRIFFITH. I was born on January 22, 1875 and died on July 23, 1948. When I left this earth I was abandoned and alone shoved to the side by the very industry I helped to create. In my lifetime I was called bigot, the father of film, the man who invented Hollywood, master and genuis. But in reality I am just a POOR COUNTRY BOY FROM KENTUCKY who wanted nothing more than to be a famous writer, a playwright. That is not something I accomplished, for the only play I sold, "A Fool and A Girl" closed after the first weekend.
ANYWAY, It's hard to believe that in just over a year it will be one hundred years since I set foot in the Biograph studio. That old brownstone house on eleven east fourteenth street in good old New York. How I miss those first few years. "We tinkered daily with the movie toy, like children making up games."But it wasn't too long before that, that moving pictures were condemed and reviled by the actors of the day. Including myself...
I remember that day so long ago in New York, when I ran into an old friend from Kentucky... I was down on my luck, couldn't find work and my dear friend said, "you've heard of the moving pictures haven't you? To which I replied, "Why, I don't know; supose I have, but I haven't seen one, Why?" His reply... I work in them over the summer; make five dollars a day when I play the lead. It's not half bad and it keeps you going." My Reply... Ye Gods Man, some of my fiends might see me and then I'd be done for. I haven't reached the point where I have to work in moving pictures."
FORTUNATELY FOR ME, I guess, I had no choice. For you see I had a wife and responsibilities. So I trudged along down to that old brownstone and became one of their actors. That is until that fateful day when a meeting in the front offive between Henry Marvin and his brother Arthur Marvin would change everything.
"I don't get it, another director has failed, why can't we get anywhere with these moving pictures?" Do you know of anyone else who might be able to direct?" "Well", drawled the genial Arthur, "I don't know they're a funny lot, these actors, but there's one young man, one actor, seems to have idea's. You might try him."
I was promptly called to the front office. Henry Marvin, "My brother tells me you appear rather interested in the pictures, Mr. Griffith, how would you like to direct one?" I rose from my chair, took three steps to the window, and gazed out into space. Henry Marvin, "Think you'd like to try it, Mr. Griffith?" "I appreciate your confidence in me, Mr. Marvin, but there is just this to it. I've had rather rough sledding the last few years and you see I'm married; I have responsibilities and I can not afford to take chances; I think they rather like me around here as an actor. Now if I take this picture-directing over and fall down, then you see I'll be out my acting job. I don't want to lose my job as an actor down here." Henry Marvin, "Otherwise you'd be willing to direct a picture for us? "Oh, yes, Indeed I would." Henry Marvin, "Then if I promise that if you fall down as a director, you can have your acting job back, you will put on a moving picture for us?" AND AS THEY SAY THE REST IS HISTORY.SO I STARTED MY CAREER with a picture titled, "The Adventures of Dolly." I'll never forget the day of the screening by the front office. The only sound in the darkened little projection room was the buzz and whir of the projection machine. The seven hundred and thirteen feet of the "Adventures of Dolly" were reeled off. Silence...
Then Henry Marvin rose to his feet and spoke; "that's it, that's something like it, at last." I had a long and brilliant career according to some, but I never really felt like a success. I spent my whole life fending off that old wolf, poverty. Failure was thrust upon me when the industry I worked so hard for tossed me aside.HOWEVER, at my funeral a well known actor of the day, who remains anonymous said, "See how pale those old men look. They could have helped D. W. Now they realize how selfish they were, and they're afraid." Other people said...DONALD CRISP, acting president of the Academy of Motion picture Arts and Sciences, "Difficult as it may have been for him to play a subordinate role, I do not believe that the fault was entirely his own. I cannot help feeling that there should always have been a place for him and his talent in the motion picture field. It is hard to believe that the industry could not have found a use for his great gift."CHARLES BRACKET, Academy vice president, "It was the fate of David Wark Griffith to have a success unknown in the entertainment world until his day, and to sufffer the agonies which only a success of that magnitude can engender when it is past. Even the Academy's presentation of an Oscar in 1936 did little to ease Griffith's heartache. There was no solution for Griffith but a kind of frenzied beating on the barred doors of one day after another. Unfortunately, when he is dead, a man's career has but one tense. The laurels are fresh on the triumphant brow. He lies here, the embittered years forgotten - David Wark Griffith - The Great."LIONEL BARRYMORE wrote, " D. W. Griffith is dead and there is wailing and a gnashing of teeth. Yes, but a trifle belatedly. He moved quietly, a silent and rather sorrowful figure in this film capital for the last ten year. I feel honored to have been associated with him in the smallest way, although, bless him, he always tried to make one feel his contribution was great even though it might have been piffle. He was my dear friend and I salute him with all my heart."The director, FRANK CAPRA, "Since Griffith, there's been no major improvements in the art of film direction. He was indeed the poor mans shakespeare."The director, CECIL B. DE MILLE, "People used to flatter me by saying that D. W. Griffith and I were rivals. Griffith had no rivals. He was the teacher of us all."JAMES AGEE, "He achieved what no other known man has ever achieved. To watch his work is like being witness to the beginning of melody, or the first conscious use of the lever or the wheel; the evergence, coordination, and eloquence of language; the birth of an art; and to realize that this is all the work of one man... Hollywood and, to a great extent, movies in general, grew down from him rather than up past him... There is not a man working in movies, or a man who cares for them, who does not owe Griffith more than he owes anybody esle."The Actress, LILLIAN GISH, in a letter to David written the day he died, "Dear David, Did you leave with a heavy heart? I know how deeply you believed in the goodness of the human family... So you wrote on celluloid a new formula that would cure the world's ills. Your record of this new medium is there for all to see in the films you made... It is strange that you who loved the written and spoken word so dearly should have created a new art form which spoke so clearly without ever putting a word on paper. I can still hear your indignant cry when you read that your film, The Birth of a Nation, was full of prejudice. You said these critics hadn't seen your picture or else they would know that the black man when bad was made so by the white. That you had been raised by them and loved and undersood them... and in that moment, the idea for your favorite film, Intolerance was born. As I look again at the film, I wonder how its four intricate stories, with all their detail, could have been keep so clearly in the head of one man, without the help of a single note. This film was your answer to those film critics... No century that has given the world a Dante, an Edison, a Griffith can be wholly bad. Had they joined forces peace would reign again upon our earth. Then unto you our farewell love, dear David. Thou art well loved, dear David. We shall not look upon your like again.MY TWO BIGGEST REGRETS are ONE... that my film, Birth of a Nation was so completely misunderstood and brought anger and grief to some. For that was never my intent... I merely wanted to tell a story of the South. For in the history books they only tell the winning side of the story.
and TWO... that I never told my dear Miss Lillian Gish how I trully felt about her.SO, NOW YOU KNOW SOMETHING ABOUT ME. I quess you can say I got the last laugh, the final word, etc... Since my work is still out there and can be bought, rented and even checked out, for all the world to see.And also you see, because the studio UNITED ARTISTS I co-founded with Mary Pickford, Charles Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks has come full cirle. The studio we started as a way to keep the control of the films in the hands of the artists has today been handed back over to the artists. Take good care of our baby, TOM.
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